The Cisticolas of Admiral Lynes

Looking back from today, at the ripe old age of 55, I see clearly that two interwoven themes have dominated and directed my birding life. Firstly a loathing of being indoors during daylight hours and secondly the overwhelming desire to live as free as a bird. In particular the wish to travel south and north as do the migrating birds, making the most of our daylight, reveling in both the sunshine and the rain.

However in our world of compromise I cannot be outdoors whenever I wish, and I am not free to move along with my beloved birds, so I seek solace at every opportunity – retreating into my imagination. Into tales about the secret lives of birds and birders then and now. I find that reading the words of others serves to rekindle a spark of wonder, even whilst indoors; the flame which being-outside-in-Nature so easily ignites. And this despite Mach’s principle that the element of wonder never lies in the phenomenon, but always in the person observing.

For example: after living in East Africa for nearly six years I can admit at last that I find the african grass warblers, nowadays called Cisticolas, truly wonderful. Admit that I am ready to take-them-on and, no longer in secret, to admit my love for the most difficult of avian genera (difficult in the sense of being hard to identify) that has issued from this old continent – praise be to the Cisticoline Grass Warblers! This is a very african group of birds; only three species of Cisticola have been able to maintain themselves beyond our shores. So in my opinion Cisticolas are indeed great!

Ashy Cisticola (Cisticola cinereolus)

I suppose it’s taken a while for me to ‘come-out’ on this one because these brown african grass warblers are certainly not many visiting birder’s favourite tipple. Typically it is seldom long after meeting me in Kilimanjaro airport or at some isolated savanna airstrip in northern Tanzania, that one of my birding guests is apt to comment something along these lines:
“Well, I cannot even pronounce Cisticola, let alone try to identify them“.

Also one finds whilst on mammal-oriented safaris many guests will refuse to allow the vehicle’s driver to stop for such a dreadful “LBJ”. Again, on walking safaris, it’s amazing how often guests and “big white hunters with guns”, and even our local guides will fail to notice the cisticolas calling and wing-snapping in aerial song-flight right above their heads or duetting from a tussock almost under our noses.

According to Dale Zimmerman, Don Turner and David Pearson in their invaluable Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania one pronounces the c-word as follows: sis-TIC-olas (the accent being on the second syllable) and these authors continue that the cisticolas “are small grass- or bush-dwelling warblers with a reputation for defying field determination. Species distinctions can be subtle, and complicated by racial, seasonal and individual variation…”

It is perhaps unfortunate that the generic name Cisticola was first penned, for one dare say it might be a misnomer, by the German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup. Certainly not by the young yet widely travelled and, at 25 years of age, already retired, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who was born in Constantinople, and quite accurately described, the marshy haunts of the Fan-tailed Warbler when he named it Sylvia juncidis during his stay in Sicily at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

It was later, in the middle years of that century, that Kaup appears to have coined the name Cisticola. Yet not one member of the entire family Cisticolidae is a “haunter of the cistus”. The Fan-tailed Juncidis is the only cisticola species to have braved that peninsula of Asia, which is called Europe, at least in historical times; and this is usually known nowadays as the Zitting Cisticola, although it was still called Fan-tailed WarblerCisticola juncidis when I was a lad. It seems quite likely that this species was wrongly believed by Kaup to inhabit either maquis or garrigue (both are anthropogenic forms of Mediterranean woody scrubland – scrublands where the rock rose family, or Cistus, is particularly well-represented) rather than the marshy grasslands containing juncus beds that Rafinesque clearly knew it prefers.

However of late a theory has emerged that by giving them their generic name, Cisticola, Kaup could have meant that they are inhabitants (-cola) of a basket of woven twigs (Latin: cista-), referring to the finely meshed bottle-shaped nest of the Zitting Cisticola, where the entrance spout faces upwards, and which happens to be that used by the most widespread species. Unfortunately no other Cisticola species builds a nest of the soda-bottle shape quite like this, so it is still not a name representative of the genus as a whole.

Zitting Cisticola at La Janda near Tarifa, Andalucia

If you’ve read this far it should be clear that active enjoyment of the African grass warblers, of the genus Cisticola, is an acquired taste. In fact nearly all of my birding customers, especially those first venturing onto sub-Saharan soil, and even some experienced safari guides here in Tanzania, will soon admit to either fearing or despising these brown birds, or both in roughly equal measure.

Consequently it remains true that sadly there seems to have been relatively little advance in our study and understanding of the genus since about 1955 when C.W. Mackworth-Praed and Captain C.H. B. Grant wrote in their ground-breaking African Handbook of Birds:
“We regret that it appears to us impossible to give any definition useful to the man in the field of what is a Cisticola and what is not. Luckily their habits are mostly distinctive.”

However they continue:
“Through the researches of the late Admiral Hubert Lynes more is known about the Grass Warblers than about any comparable group of African birds.”

“Whatever their general habitat whether downland, marshland, or woodland, grass of some sort is essential to their existence. They are insectivorous, and of generally inconspicuous habits, except in the case of breeding males. The tail is always of twelve feathers, and , unless very short, well graduated. In most species there is a subterminal black spot on the tail feathers, while the colouration is almost entirely made up of brown tints and shades in a variety of colour patterns with grey, buff and tawny. ”

It so happens that Hubert Lynes was born on this very date – November 27 – in 1874. Hubert Lynes became interested in birds, their eggs and and of course in ‘bird’s nesting’ at an early age and was only thirteen when he joined the Royal Navy. He devoted 32 years to that service during which time he rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. He made twelve expeditions to Africa and became possibly the most experience birding field man of his time in Africa. He made an expedition to Darfur between 1920 and 1922 and thereafter “became very interested in the fan-tailed warblers of the genus Cisticola“. Consequently in 1930 a special volume of The Ibis (the Journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union) was produced, entirely dedicated to these birds:
It was entitled A Review of the Genus Cisticola and earned Lynes the Goldman-Salvin award for its contribution to African ornithology.

After the publication of this seminal work Hubert Lynes made a further four expeditions to Africa primarily in order to clarify various points for a planned Appendix to that work. However on what became his last expedition, to Darfur in 1938, Lynes contracted shingles which badly affected the sight of one eye so that he returned to Britain in poor health. His health never fully recovered. He died in a military hospital in north Wales on November 10 1942.

He was described as an “outstanding character who had ideas of his own and carried them through, devoted to duty, a man of great generosity and the best of companions. He was handicapped by gun deafness but this was offset by an extremely quick eye. He was often impetuous but prepared for action or an expedition in a most methodical way.”
It is perhaps pertinent to note here that “Admiral Lynes never married and when not on sea duty was under the watchful care of his devoted sister, Miss Lynes.”

Although the constituents of such an unglamorous and widely distributed genus, often occurring as they do in derived and semi-open habitats rather than in the depths of some awesome forest, have yet to be subjected to rigorous and widespread DNA analysis there are, almost certainly, at least 40 ‘good species’ of Cisticola here in East Africa, that is forty species within the boundaries of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.
And in some terrific ‘LBJ’ places, within an area of say only 20 square kilometres, there could be as many as fifteen different kinds of Cisticola.

Yep! These are not soft brown sodas, sickly bottled Colas, we’re talking about here – they’re the Cisticolas, the original and best – the Grass Warblers of Africa.

Nature’s crowning glory when you are “Birding between the Lynes!”

Africa’s Cisticola species have some remarkable, even unforgettable, names:

In the late eighties two fantastic birders – let’s acknowledge them: Iain and Richard – once guided a group together across Kenya.

Early on a Sunday morning the birders stood in a quiet and respectful line facing the big brown boulders at the stake-out for what was then, and is again, known as the Rock-loving Cisticola. However instead of a bird vocalisation Iain loudly plays the title track from Bruce Springstein’s “Born in the USA”.
Some of the, dare we say, slower-witted customers grumbled audibly yet, no doubt they thought, under their breath about Iain’s er … morning condition:
“My Gawd Mildred, he’s got the wrong tape again!”

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6 Comments

This is wonderful, James, thank you! Have you had any luck in finding a copy of Kaup’s Skizzirte Entwicklungsgeschichte? I haven’t. He’s not usually forthcoming about his etymologies, but maybe in this case he does explain it. Cista is often used in a more specific meaning, “portable reliquary,” which is very nice in application to a bird’s nest. Best, rick

Great post, James. Cisticolidae really is a hugely mixed up group now with all those genera included in it. If Wikipedia’s claim that “They are believed to be quite closely related to the swallows and martins, the bulbuls and the white-eyes” is accurate they’re even more mixed up than I’d ever realised.